"PbP"/Skypegaming with a chess board

[Morph Bark]

In PbP games, at least for DnD and other RPG systems that work best with a grid for combat, groups often use either a drawn map consistently updated or a combat grid program.

Not having a combat grid program and figuring them to likely be hard for me, I came up with something: what if you used a chess board instead? Put miniatures labelled with everyone's characters' names and the enemies on it and you're good to go! Would work especially well for games taking place over chat systems rather than PbP games, I imagine.

I kinda figured this might be more appropriate for the Finding Players board in a way, since it is more relevant for the people there, but this isn't for Finding Players, so eh. I hope plenty of people who frequent the PbP boards on GitP (or other boards) also attend the Roleplaying forum.

[Eldan]

We sort of did this once. "Fighter to F4" (etc) actually became a running gag of sorts in our group for a while. Didn't work badly.

We even tried to play Warhammer 40k like that for a while, with every square representing 6" of the game board. That was rather unwieldy, though. And vassal did it better.

[JeminiZero]

Has anyone tried something like Google Docs for this? I imagine a spreadsheet with color for terrain, letters to represent creatures might also work...

[PersonMan]

Has anyone tried something like Google Docs for this? I imagine a spreadsheet with color for terrain, letters to represent creatures might also work...

I use Google Docs, yeah. After a bit of setup to stretch a bunch of squares to the right shape you get something like this.